I heard about it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who... no that's a song. This is a story about what happened earlier today. My friend told me she was hitting…
Posts published in “Essays”
My uncle, the late 5th District Supervisor Joe Scaramella, was an avid reader all his life. He described the county’s media during his tour in office in the 1950s and 60s as “mostly duplicative and…
The opening day of the major league baseball season is when I start to live again until October when pro basketball and NFL football take over and the fan in me goes into a long…
April 10th is our publication date, quite a day in journalism history. First we have to go back to 1866, when a gangly 19-year-old Hungarian immigrant handed his last five dollars to a slick, fast-talking…
The gas and petroleum industries have already invaded California with an extremely destructive technology, hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Fracking is used by oil and gas companies to rework aging or abandoned oil wells.…
Back in the murky pre-history of San Francisco's fabled Haight-Ashbury, even before the fabled “Summer of Love” in 1967, let alone the ever-evolving touristic version of it, were the Diggers. Not the “Digger Indians” or…
The intemperate genius John Bull was born in either 1562 or 1563. Let’s choose the later of these two possibilities and duly celebrate 2013 as Bull’s 450th. In contrast to the archetypal Englishman John Bull,…
The very first course that Norman O. Brown taught when he arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1968 was Myth & History and I was among the lucky people to hear him deliver that series of lectures. I was also privileged to meet with Norman in his office on two occasions to talk about various things, notably the fifty-page manuscript I composed in response to his lectures.
On March 18, U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke at a National Postal Forum in San Francisco, prompting picketing by rank and file postal employees and their supporters. Protestors opposed Donahoe’s support for post office…